Every election feels like the election of a lifetime, with far-reaching consequences – right up to the next one where the stakes are somehow even higher! But this year is, indeed, different even from other presidential elections. This year, the billionaire-backed Let’s Go Washington put 4 initiatives on the ballot. Any one of them is devastating to Washington; taken as a whole, they would radically reshape efforts for a cleaner, healthier state, with a stronger educational system, and with long-term care for the aging members of our communities. Even individually, they make deep changes to our state.
Initiative 2109, regarding the capital gains tax passed in 2021, if passed would reverse efforts by the Washington State legislature to improve the fairness of our tax system. The capital gains tax is 7% on extraordinary profits, profits that come from the sale of stocks, bonds, or other investments that net more than $250,000 for the seller. The money that the state collects from the capital gains tax goes into the Education Legacy Trust Account (ELTA), which funds affordable childcare, early education, special education, and school construction. Cutting that money from the budget will remove approximately $5 billion from ELTA over the next 6 years. The tax is paid by fewer than 4,000 individuals in the state of Washington; 99.8% of Washingtonians will never incur this capital gains tax.
The 2021 Climate Commitment Act (CCA) would be heavily impacted by Initiative 2117, which prohibits the state from imposing any kind of carbon tax credit trading, and directly repeals the CCA’s “cap-and-invest” program, where money realized from sales of carbon credits are invested into climate programs. Those programs – essential investments in every county in Washington – are investments in clean air and water, forests and farmlands, jobs, and transportation, and include programs such as utility bill discounts for low-income households, fish habitat repair, and wildfire prevention programs. Repealing cap-and-invest would push the cost of addressing pollution from polluters onto working families and their communities.
Initiative 2124 makes participation in the state’s Long Term Care Trust program voluntary and opens the door for private companies to offer similar long-term care coverage for expenses not covered by Medicaid or traditional insurances, such as wheelchair ramps in a home. The history of private long-term care insurance suggests strongly that premiums will spiral upwards and some insurers will leave the Washington market, leaving their clients without long-term care funds for those uncovered expenses.
The newest initiative, Initiative 2066, forces public utilities to offer natural gas whether or not there are cheaper, cleaner, better options available for consumers. It prohibits public utilities – often large polluters in their own right – from developing plans that do not include natural gas, and ends several programs that allow Washington State’s residents and small-business owners to transition to cleaner sources of power, such as rebate programs for heat pump conversions.
The first three initiatives have deep fiscal impacts, and all four will negatively affect Washington State. The funding necessary for a strong educational system doesn’t appear out of thin air; passing Initiative 2109 would force the Legislature to either underfund or defund parts of the educational system (and you all know how hard we’ve all been working to get that funding up!) or defund other critical priorities to find the money for education. The impact of climate change is very real and growing every year, and the costs associated with addressing it will be passed on to consumers if polluters get a free pass.
It's very clear that these four initiatives have been brought forward in an effort to benefit the very few in Washington, at the expense of the rest of us. We cannot build a strong, responsive, healthy state that provides opportunity and safe communities for all without money to do so, and these initiatives all seek to cut off that money and take it back out of the pockets of working Washingtonians.